Number Seven was manned by schizophrenics. Since they were already mad, they did not go crazy. Nevertheless, they did not come back. Number Eight was catatonics. Nine was paranoids. Ten was sadists. Eleven was masochists. Twelve was a mixed crew of sadists and masochists. No luck.
Maybe it was because thirteen was still a mystic number, or maybe it was merely that the Solar Government was running out of ideas. At any rate, ship Number Thirteen was the longest shot of all.
Background: From the beginnings of Man, it had been known that certain plants—mushrooms, certain cacti—produced intense hallucinations. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists—and others less scientifically minded—had begun to extract those hallucinogenic compounds, chiefly mescaline and psilocybin. The next step was the synthesis of hallucinogens—L.S.D. 25 was the first, and it was far more powerful than the extracts.
In the next few centuries, more and more different hallucinogens were synthesized—L.S.D. 105, Johannic acid, huxleyon, baronite.
So by the time the Solar Government had decided that the crew of ship Number Thirteen would attempt to cope with the terrible reality of interstellar space by denying that reality, they had quite an assortment of hallucinogens to choose from.
The one they chose was a new, as-yet-untested ("Two experiments for the price of one," explained economy-minded officials) and unbelievably complex compound tentatively called Omnidrene.
Omnidrene was what the name implied—a hallucinogen with all the properties of the others, some which had proven to be all its own, and some which were as yet unknown. As ten micrograms was one day's dose for the average man, it was the ideal hallucinogen for a starship.
So they sealed five men and five women—they had given up on sexually unbalanced crews—in ship Number Thirteen, along with half a ton of Omnidrene and their fondest wishes, pointed the ship towards Centaurus, and prayed for a miracle.
In a way they could not possibly have foreseen, they got it.